Reading, listening to, and questioning America... from the southern Great Plains

Trump loses?

Trump belongs to the media, not America. America and its corporate, largely right wing, media have been at war for so long that many of us believed America to be all over but for the shouting. The latest Washington Post/AP poll shows America reviving and the media catching all hell.

It's about time. It took the dubious candidacy of Donald Trump to wake us up. There remain a few, though wide-spread, theories that Trump is a poseur, put there to reveal the sickness of our political system and, in particular of the political right and the media. Whatever, but:

...If Donald Trump secures the Republican presidential nomination, he would start the general election campaign as the least-popular candidate to represent either party in modern times.

Three-quarters of women view him unfavorably. So do nearly two-thirds of independents, 80 percent of young adults, 85 percent of Hispanics and nearly half of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents. ...

Head-to-head matchups show Hillary Clinton, as well as her Democratic rival Bernie Sanders, leading Trump, often by double digits. Even his two remaining fellow GOP contenders this week backed away from earlier promises to support the eventual nominee. ...WaPo

"Barack Obama will retire a happy man. He is now close to destroying his political enemies—the Republican Party, the American conservative movement and the public-policy legacy of Ronald Reagan," according to an editorial in the Wall Street Journal.

Okay, Obama deserves a lot of credit for maintaining moral stature during the GOP's serious efforts to bury America in septic mud. But the GOP deserves credit -- at least --for offing itself. And Republicans were deep in the do-do even before Obama even began to surface as a candidate. Congress, from 1994 onwards, has become headquarters for an embarrassment of bombasts. Before that, Republicans wet themselves in Watergate and were all too eager to embrace the likes of Oliver North and Lee Atwater and that sweet guy, the Ronald Reagan of Nicaragua and Iran-Contra.

In contrast, Obama has behaved like a mensch and deserves a lot of credit for not losing his cool, but the Republican party was already angry and destructive by 1961 when our current president was born.

If it's any comfort to decent Republicans (no! honest! there are quite a few!), Hillary Clinton isn't doing that much better than Trump in the "ugh" category.

A silver lining for Trump is that voters also feel antipathy for Clinton, the Democratic front-runner. The distaste for Clinton is not as strong as it is for Trump — 52 percent of voters see her unfavorably — but Clinton’s vulnerabilities, combined with Trump’s unpredictability, haunt many Democrats. ...WaPo